The original Google had a clear focus, index the web, and index it well, in every possible direction - incoming and outgoing links with relevance as it’s most important focus. That was clearly detailed in a story over at the O’Reilly Network, “How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Panopticon“:

How much ass does Google kick? All of it.

Remember when searching the Internet was hard? The dark days when we relied on dumb-as-sand machine intelligences, like those on the back-ends of AltaVista and Lycos, to rank the documents that matched our keywords? The grim era before Google, when searching was a spew of boolean mumbo-jumbo, NEAR this, NOT that, AND the other?

God, that sucked.

Lucky for the Internet, Google figured out the One True Way to make sense of the Internet, to defeat gamers of the system and send info-free brochureware plummeting to number n - 1 out of n results.

They did it with our help. Google’s near-magical ordering of the Internet is built around the notion that computers are good at doing repetitive, uncreative things — fetishistically counting things, for example — and rotten at understanding why they’re being asked to do these boring tasks. By contrast, human beings are great at understanding why they’re doing something, but they’re woefully deficient in the do-the-same-thing-perfectly-and-forever department. (by Cory Doctorow 03/08/2002)

Today, you’ll find the pages with the most Google AdSense words in top listings. Pages of nothing more than random text with a centralized theme that allows it to trigger the proper Google AdSense ads. In Addition, Google, of course, forbids this in their AdSense Guidelines. They must have valuable content, not random search-engine padding content.

But then again, it is in Google’s best interest to allow AdSense ads to cover the earth, so many more opportunities for people to click. The vague titles and descriptions that some use allow for them to monetize on clicks when people don’t even know what they are clicking for. End up on a crappy page, why search again, just look for something relevant on the page to go visit, I mean THIS PAGE was recommended as the top pic for the term by GOOGLE. And we all know, Google Rocks.

Well, in my mind, Google does rock. They are the most aggresive in web-application development, utilizing the exploits of true W3C compliant code and maximizing the tools utilizing JavaScript. The Google Maps launch was far from quiet among avid Google users and people on the web in a whole. Google Earth, another great application, too bad they didn’t figure out how to just embed the thing into a webpage. These are all incredible applications. Google is a king in this forward-thinking. Adding things like phone numbers, area codes, all types of lookups which are there just waiting to either provide you an answer or lead you to the proper place to find what you need.

But they need to clean up their listings. Get the SE spam out. I report it, it stays listed forever. How many complaints does it take so say someone is spamming the engine before they realize it? A very popular cellular activation website was recently banned from Google for spamming their engine. Given, their methodology was lame and outdated, they should have known that just hard, dedicated efforts to maximize every page can provide even better results than spamming search terms repeatedly in hidden areas of the page.

C’mong google.

Clean up your AdSense droppings from all over the web. Make sites be real. Perhaps employ your vast database of content your spiders have on the sites applying to display ads. Do they have content and incoming links from non-related websites? If so, then approve them for the publishers program. If they don’t exist in your engine, pass. Just pass on them all together. They aren’t legit.

Okay?

Why does it take a nearing-40 crazy man to say these things for someone to hear? Don’t you hear it from other customers? Then again, I guess no one really sends that much feedback - PLEASE! The company for which I work gets thousands of emails daily from customers, and we get no where near the traffic of Google. I’m sure there is information overload in the emails you receive. But so much more data to mine for relevance of associated topics, likes, dislikes and match it up with the mega-Googlebase and then you have a demographic, address and other information on the web associated with the person to whom you are talking.